Hell, Bell, and the Bullhorn Guy...

Matthew 22:37-40:

"And he [Jesus] said to him, 'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.'"

Rob Bell's summary of the above passage, from "Bullhorn:"

"Love God with everything that you have, and then love those around you in the same kinda way. Jesus doesn't separate loving God and loving others."

In other words, according to Bell, since we love God, each other, and ourselves in all the same way, that means that I'm God, you're God, we're all God. To Mr. Bell, Hell isn't about God and His holiness, it's about us, our intolerance, selfishness, and lameness (Bullhorn, 10:10). Even when postmoderns say that Hell=separation from God, they aren't really referring to the One True God of the Bible, the God that is love; instead they mean separation from some sort of misguided, worldly "Love" which they elevate to god-status.

At least Keller directly quotes Scripture, even if taken out of context. The same cannot be said for Bell, who deliberately uses generalized, misquoted Scripture (and taken out of context, no less) to mislead thousands into believeing an even more blatantly heretical and unashamedly perverse doctrine of Hell.

OK, here's another tack on things, which reverses the order of what Tim Keller was trying to do.

1. Start with C.S. Lewis' idea that the gates of hell are locked from the inside. I remember being greatly convicted when I first heard it put like that, although I had been a Christian for a while.

2. Then, up the ante by talking about it in terms of selfishness and so on - the natural result, you could say, of living the way you are living

3. Then, start talking about God and his Holiness and Wrath, as we're supposed to.

Why in this order? This is only a hypothesis but I wonder with postmoderns if introducing Hell as being about God's wrath is going a little too far in one shot. Hence, breaking it up into small pieces which then lead inexorably to the matter of Holiness and Wrath might be a better way to go. Anyway, criticisms of this idea welcome.

When Lewis wrote of God's Law and that we have all broken it, he used the idea of moral law (this is Mere Christianity) instead of the Ten Commandments, although it leads to the Ten Commandments easily enough.

The main point that I took away from Bell's Bullhorn video, was that the Bullhorn Guy had broken the first commandment of the Emergent Church: Above all, Thou Shalt be Hip.

Bell was sporting some-super cool glasses, flip flops, a tight-fitting T-shirt in sync with the metro-sexual times, and girl jeans. Bullhorn Guys is a little overweight, has a terrible haircut, and pulls his "conservative" khakis up way too high. This is the real reason Bell doesn't want to be painted with the same brush as the Bullhorn Guy.